Abandoned Sentinel

Well, again I have to apologize for missing a week. Unfortunately my weekends have been busy of late, and my hiking has suffered, leading to a lack of photos. I’ll try to do better.

This weekend’s hike was familiar ground. I was back at Wompatuck State Park in Hingham, Mass. This is a former munitions depot, with the old rail lines mostly paved and converted to bike paths. The old buildings were torn down and the rubble buried, but you can still find some interesting structures alongside the trails.

I wasn’t expecting anything special. Today’s hike was a short one, over trails I’ve covered before, more for the exercise than any expectation of finding something interesting. However I too a wrong turn, and ended up on a trail I hadn’t walked before, and found this.

It’s probably out of service, although it’s close enough to the main park road that there might still be an active water main below. But it’s clearly no longer being maintained, or the paint would have been refreshed at some point.

But there it stands, like many other things of the former base, abandoned because the cost of removal wasn’t worth the bother. Now it’s just a slowly rusting reminder that this hasn’t always been a wilderness. Most people biking along the trail won’t even notice it, it blends in with the leaves and trees so well.

I like this because it’s another of those seemingly misplaced relics one finds in the woods of New England. Perhaps more modern than a stone foundation or an old well, but a similar testament to how our use of the land has changed over time.

This image is another HDR, made from a bracket of five photos taken at ISO 3200 (it was dim under the trees), at f/11, with the bracket centered at 1/125th-second exposure. I did not use the circular polarizer. In fact, it was so dim I had to turn off the auto-focus, because it kept getting confused (and modern DSLRs viewfinders lack the support for manual focus that an older camera would have, so that’s always something of a challenge). In the HDR software, I took the Deep 2 present, and except for backing off contrast to 0 (the preset reduced it for some reason) I didn’t have to make any changes. Back in C1, I did sharpen the image slightly, but not by much.